A short post which might save you an hour or so banging your head against your computer screen.

I’ve been setting up another site using indexhibit for a CMS – it’s a pretty standard installation, using PHP, Apache2 and MySQL. Database creation is identical to WordPress and setting up the system is simple – however once everything appeared to be working, I hit a really really frustrating and fundamentally crippling problem.

The Problem: Unable to upload pictures to exhibits

Pictures upload to the server, but the CMS does not ‘see’ them – you don’t get thumbnails, you don’t get the option to upload more images, you can’t use them in your exhibit. Basically, this renders the whole site useless.

The Solution:

Install GD. GD is a PHP extension which is used to process uploaded images – you can read more here, should you so desire.

To install, type the following at the command prompt:

$ sudo apt-get install php5-gd

Usual apt installation process will occur ( After this operation, 602kB of additional disk space will be used.Do you want to continue [Y/n]? ), and after that you can restart Apache – it will reload the config files as part of the install, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.